Scribbling alone in your notebook one night, you create the first draft of your Magnum Opus. The tangy smell of ink never left your body after you crafted a scroll to bring to your editor. Yet as she reads it, you learn that it is almost identical to a story written in Prague forty years ago. Cryptomnesia - a blog about literature and writing by author Joseph Patrick Pascale.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Imagine the long hours spent crafting the perfect novel -
revising each sentence to perfection, fleshing out each character, and tying
the plot into a cohesive whole - only to discover that the novel already
exists. Another author wrote it a long time ago. At some point in the distant
past, you read it and then forgot all about it. When the memory came back to
you, you mistook it for your own original idea.

That, in essence, is cryptomnesia. While it may sound like
something out of the Twilight Zone, there is evidence to suggest that this is a
very real phenomenon. For some time, I feared the idea of unknowingly
plagiarizing in my own writing. Do you know how many short stories I powered
through as assigned reading in college that I can’t even remember the titles or
authors of anymore? All these things could be bouncing around in my faulty
memories, just waiting to come out as bursts of “inspiration.”

“Maar finds the coincidence of plot, narrative and name
'’striking.’' He does not accuse Nabokov of plagiarism, since ‘'he was a genius
on his own.’' (As some are too rich to steal, apparently, others are too smart
to crib.) Maar prefers the word ''cryptomnesia,'' a process by which things are
learned, forgotten and then mistaken for original inspirations when recalled.”

Reading it now, I found that the Times article came to a
similar opinion as I have after contemplating the problem of cryptomnesia over
this past decade. Caldwell describes the novel as “a word game sustained across
some 300 pages,” and says of Nabokov, “Honing a distinctive literary voice
obsessed him.” The writing in Lolita is so rich, the style so artful, that even
if the plot and characters come from a misinterpreted memory, it doesn’t dampen
the art of the novel at all.

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure
unfinished masterpiece” ― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

For all we know, what happened with Nabokov wasn’t even
cryptomnesia, but a purposeful allusion to an obscure short story that had a
great impact on him. To reduce the novel to the bare minimum of plot and
characters is to lose most of its significance. Writers and artists draw
inspiration from past works and create their own versions all the time. There’s
nothing inherently immoral or plagiarist about this. In fact, perhaps it’s our
culture’s idea of plagiarism that is in the wrong here.

Creativity and Pure Originality

Back in college I took an Advertising Copywriting class, and
the professor always liked to say that creativity wasn’t about being totally
unique or original - it was about finding a new combination of old ideas. I had
a professor with a similar mentality when I took a medieval literature class in
graduate school. He said that originality was overrated in our current society.

Purposeful “Cryptomnesia” Throughout the History of
Literature

As a point of comparison, let’s jump back to the 14th Century
and examine "The Father of English Literature." Geoffrey Chaucer didn’t think it
was sagacious to admit to purely inventing stories. Even when he was making up a new
story, he would claim it was a translation from another language to add more
authenticity to it. This is a very different mindset than the prevailing
attitude in our society that artists must be “original” and “unique” in order
to be creative. Look at what many consider to be Chaucer’s best work (no, notThe Canterbury Tales, which is more famous, but
incomplete), the poem Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385). The story is set during the
siege of Troy, with characters from ancient Greek literature. Chaucer’s source
for this poem was
Boccaccio'sIl Filostrato (ca.
1335-1340), and Boccaccio had based his on a French poem called Le Roman deTroie (The Romance of
Troy, ca. 1155-1160) by Benoît deSainte-Maure, which
is itself a retelling of the Trojan War, probably largely based on Homer’s poems (ca. 1260-1240 BC). That’s the history
of the poem working backward from Chaucer, but moving forward from Chaucer,
some 200 years later we find Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida (ca. 1602), which was
inspired by Chaucer’s poem. An interesting fact the Wikipedia entry notes is:

“The story was a popular one for dramatists in the early
17th century and Shakespeare may have been inspired by contemporary plays.
Thomas Heywood's two-part play The Iron Age also depicts the Trojan war and the
story of Troilus and Cressida, but it is not certain whether his or Shakespeare's
play was written first.”

So there could have been a lot of versions of this story
going around at the turn of the 17th century. I’m sure if you looked into it,
you could find additional modern retellings of this story dating to our age.

But my point in tracing all these different versions of
Troilus is to show that originality was never a requirement for writers
throughout history. The fact that Shakespeare’s version essentially shares the
same plot he took from Chaucer’s doesn’t invalidate Shakespeare’s as a
masterpiece in its own right. To boil it down to just the threadbare plot and
characters is to lose so much of what people celebrate in Shakespeare. Would it
be any different if Shakespeare had indeed read the poem or seen another play
version of it, but forgot and thought the play was entirely his own creation?

Cryptomnesia: Total Recall - The Case of Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything I’ve considered thus far assumes that the
cryptomnesiac’s later version of the work is distinctly different from the
original, subconsciously remembered version. Even though they share
similarities, the new version is decidedly different.

But what do you make of the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, the
philosopher - or anti-philosopher (as may be more appropriate)? Or in this
case we could simply call him a novelist, since we’re discussing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. According to Shell of Man:

“Friedrich Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra includes
an almost word for word account of an incident also included in a book
published about 1835, half a century before Nietzsche wrote.”

The fact that it is “almost word for word” is what makes
this case of cryptomnesia seem different to me. It was Carl Jung who discovered the
duplication of the earlier story and declared it cryptomnesia. According to
Frances Oppel in Nietzsche on Gender:

"The piece of text 'secretly crept up and reproduced
itself' [quote from Jung] in "Of Great Events" (Z 2). Jung recognized
the story about seamen stopping on an island to hunt rabbits, having read it in
his grandfather's library. He wrote Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, who confirmed
that she and Nietzsche had read the same book in their grandfather's library,
when Nietzsche was eleven. This, Jung informed his Zarathustra seminar, 'shows
how the unconscious layers of the mind work.'"

The case of Nietzsche is particularly fascinating, since
there’s the tragic downward spiral of his descent into madness late in life.
Could it be that at a young age his genius mind had near total recall of
memories, but as he aged and his brain faltered, whole chunks of intact memories
came back to him with the sources missing?

From the point of view of one phobic of cryptomnesia, the
near-perfect reproduction of a text can add no new value to the art - to argue
that, one would enter the farcical territory of Borges, with his Pierre Menard who perfectly reproduced Don Quixote to
the adulations of critics who could now apply contemporary literary theory to
the “new” work.

But even in Nietzsche’s case, his one section of
cryptomnesiac text is only four pages of a work over 300 pages long. It’s the sort of book where a passage from another text wouldn’t be out of place,
even purposefully inserted, since it’s full of allusions and often features
Nietzsche’s subversive interpretations of extant ideas. All that said, it’s
another case of cryptomnesia with virtually no harm done.

Cryptomnesia and Plagiarism in Our World

It seems to me that when Jung was looking into cryptomnesia,
it was because of a Freudian fascination with the subconscious. However, when people
talk about it today, it’s connected with a cultural fear of plagiarism - in
this case, a plagiarism so treacherous that you don’t know you’re doing it.
This fits into a conversation where college students are frequently told that you should never “plagiarize
yourself,” by
which instructors mean not to reuse papers from previous courses.It’s evident that there can be serious
concerns of actually plagiarizing word-for-word, stealing content, and
falsifying sources, but it seems to be something growing beyond these arenas.

Our society has developed an uncomfortable relationship with
plagiarism and copyright infringement. However, they seem to be foolish fears.
Fear of plagiarism related to school is rooted in cheating. School has been
slow to adapt to the Information Age, with its abundance of that which used to be scarce, and
the extreme fear of plagiarism shows a slowness to adapt. Instructors drill the
fear of plagiarism into students so much that students think they can’t write a
paper without citing every line because they’re writing on topics they’re just
learning, and obviously they had to learn that information from somewhere, like
their textbook.I suspect that something
similar is going on with the battles that extend copyright well beyond its
original intention - a slowness, an inability, and a fear to catch up with the
fast pace of technology and the way people are using it to change the world.
These realms stand in stark contrast to the blogosphere, where content and
links are freely exchanged.

There’s a great essay on this topic by Jonathan Lethem called “The Ecstasy of Influence” - although it’s
not technically an essay - he subtitles it, “A plagiarism.” He patched the
whole thing together together from other sources, turning it into a completely
new work. Toward the end of the essay, he claims:

“Any text is woven entirely with citations, references,
echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast
stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous,
untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas.
The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the
actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism.”

Although, actually, while Lethem clearly is claiming this,
he’s using the words of Roland Barthes and Mark Twain
mashed together into this one quote. Fear of plagiarism is permeating our
culture to the point that people are forgetting that we learn by absorbing the
ideas of others and appropriating them to our own uses.

Cryptomnesia: A Writer’s Greatest Enemy?

So, do you have to fear that your greatest ideas were
subconsciously stolen? Do you think writers, artists, or anyone should be
worried about cryptomnesia? Do you think it’s fine that the same stories have
been repeated so often throughout the history of literature, or were hacks like
Chaucer just being unoriginal? And where does plagiarism and copyright law fit
into this conversation?

Sunday, February 9, 2014

A couple of weeks ago, I received a notification on my phone
that I had been followed by "Modern Kierkegaard" on Twitter. I clicked on the
profile, which was described as “Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy adapted for
today,” and I enjoyed the ironic truth of the most recent tweet:

People beg for followers even when they know the followers will never read their tweets - what madness!!
— Modern Kierkegaard (@KierkegaardNow) January 26, 2014

I decided to retweet this to my own Twitter account, which
includes 1,660 people I’m following that I don’t pay a terrible amount of
attention to, and I moved on with my day.

However, while my phone remained in my pocket, the
machinations of the Twitter app went into effect, deciding that if I followed
this account, added it to one of my lists, and immediately retweeted a tweet, I
must love it, so it took it upon itself to set up some sort of favorite account feature. Now whenever
@KierkegaardNow posts a tweet, my phone vibrates and the tweet appears in my
notifications.

I have to say, it’s quite reassuring to be trudging across
the tundra of a tough day in the 21st Century and have a philosopher
reach through 170 years to share some words of wisdom with you via the
technology in your pocket.

Some of the Kierkegaard tweets that struck me:

Man turns outward, away from the source of his happiness, hungry for distraction.
— Modern Kierkegaard (@KierkegaardNow) January 30, 2014

Anxiety is our new religion, and we wearily rise every morning to worship.
— Modern Kierkegaard (@KierkegaardNow) February 3, 2014

Some believe their misery makes them superior to all other people and in this they are trapped.
— Modern Kierkegaard (@KierkegaardNow) February 3, 2014

The unhappy person is one for whom the content of life lies outside the self.
— Modern Kierkegaard (@KierkegaardNow) February 4, 2014

What our age lacks is reflection and passion.
— Modern Kierkegaard (@KierkegaardNow) February 6, 2014

When one is preoccupied, the loss of the eternal does not even occur to him.
— Modern Kierkegaard (@KierkegaardNow) February 8, 2014

According to the description, Modern Kierkegaard is “an
account by @Good_Philosophy. Created by @Philosophy_Muse” and @Philosophy_Muse
says it was created by @ReidPlummer, so I’m guessing it’s thanks to him we have
these tweets.

Reborn on Twitter

It seems that anyone or anything from the past can be
reincarnated as a Twitter account. You can find a Twitter incarnation of any of
your favorite, long-dead philosophers, authors, or religious prophets. As
someone who’s wondered how many conflicts in Seinfeld episodes would have been avoided if they had cell phones,
I thoroughly enjoyed the night I discovered Modern Seinfeld.

But how accurate are the reincarnations? In a recent
interview, Larry David responded to an @SeinfeldToday tweet by saying, “I could
guarantee you that show would not get on the air,” and in a Reddit AskMeAnything, Jerry
followed up, “Oh this is a very painful subject. As you can probably imagine,
over the nine years of doing the show, Larry David and I sat through hundreds
of ideas that people wanted to do on the show. And most of the ideas are not
good.”

The Father of Existentialism...

in 140 Characters or Less

So since I can’t convince a Danish translator to travel back
in time with me so we can explain to Søren what Twitter is, give him a general
gist of what our times are like, and ask him if he thinks the account
accurately represents him, I’m left to contemplate it on my own. In all honesty, if Kierkegaard was really on Twitter, he probably wouldn't write many of his own Tweets. He would create a panoply of fake Twitter accounts, write in a different viewpoint on each account, have the accounts start to argue with each other, and then he would retweet some of the arguments on his own account.

However, from my limited knowledge of Kierkegaard, I think the Twitter account does a nice job of catching some of his essence. Kierkegaard's an extraordinarily creative writer, whips up fantastic metaphors and analogies, and makes me laugh out loud with his "aesthetic stage" writing (see his passage on why boredom is the root of all evil). I can be pretty skeptical about his religious writings though. In Fear and Trembling, it seems to me that he sets out with the idea that it had to be okay for Abraham to be willing to kill his son, so he wants to prove how it can be okay (his idea that morality is suspended in the religious stage). But I don't think he ever truly considered the concept of Abraham being in the wrong.My favorite take on the Abraham story is Kafka's parody of Fear and Trembling, which presents a series of absurd Abrahams, one who can't even make it out of his house to realize there's a choice to be made. When Kafka read Kierkegaard's diaries, he strongly identified with him, but when he read Fear and Trembling, he wrote, "It’s as if a next-door neighbor had turned into a distant star."Curiously, Kierkegaard always seems to come to me in some sort of abridged form. If you'll notice the books in the top image, the anthology features excerpts from his major works, and the Parables of Kierkegaard, a book I highly recommend, is a collection of his inventive analogies and metaphors, extracted from their original locations deep within his texts and presented by themselves on the single page or two they take up.

Finding Focus on Twitter

There may be plenty to savor if you find a good Twitter account and dig deeply into it, but with follow lists reaching into the thousands, most posts on Twitter go ignored in an endless stream of updates. The only reason I was able to get so much reflection out of the Modern Kierkegaard account was because Twitter decided to auto-notify me of every update.

Joseph Patrick Pascale

How to Get a Promotion when your Boss Is Trying to Kill You, a comic literary novel by Joseph Patrick Pascale, will be published by Waldorf Publishing in 2018. Information will be available at: www.josephpatrickpascale.com